By: Revanche

Life lessons: adults don’t know everything

January 9, 2015

“You don’t tell me ‘No’, you say ‘No’ to your parents!”

When I was nine, a landlady was prescribing the weirdest diet to fix whatever she thought was wrong with me. The details I remember involved raw eggs, sounded terrible, and possibly was meant to plump me up but I distinctly remember politely hearing her out and then answering truthfully when she wound up the unsolicited diatribe with the demand: so are you going to do it?

“No.”

She nearly burst with indignation! How DARE a scrawny child say she wasn’t going to follow her sage (and totally bogus homeopathic) advice?

She followed up with a lecture on how totally inappropriate it was for me to decline to follow the instructions and how out of line it was (I stopped listening around here to ponder on why someone who was basically a stranger would tell a little kid to defy her parents or feel the right to dispense “medical knowledge” and tell her off for trusting her parents better than a stranger in matters of…. Anything.)

I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong when I looked at Mom’s bemused face. After all, there was nothing wrong in saying No. I hadn’t called the lady a quack or been rude to her. But that was also the first time I’d ever said no to an adult. I had no idea it was going to become such a habit 🙂

In my teens, a dear friend’s dad told me something about parenting that really stuck: one of the hardest moments for kids growing up is to realize that their parents are actually human too, they make mistakes. They’re not gifted with omniscience just because they’re parents. And the moment you, as a child, realize that, your relationship evolves… And that can be painful.

It’s so true.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

In our culture, “Respect your elders” is one of the highest tenets.

To this day I still can’t call teachers who have become good friends by their first names. It’ll always be “Mr./Mrs./Ms. [X].”

Learning to manage my relationships with adults, including parents and parental fugues, required a great deal of learning to reason, to accept that we will disagree about things –fundamental life changing things– and still love and respect those who are important and disagree with me while walking my own path without their help or approval.

Heck, to this day, my dad still doesn’t know what I do for a living. It’s just completely outside the realm of normalcy in our family. They understand going into medicine (as a doctor or a nurse), engineering, and accounting. And some entrepreneurial things. But I’m the weirdo who went the Humanities route and then even further off the tracks into the professional world.  I might as well be a lawyer, it’d make more sense to them 😉

By and large, I always respected my parents and what they taught me based on their life experiences.

As a first generation kid, though, there were more than a few situations in which it would have been a big mistake to follow their guidance. Oftentimes, it seemed to just be down to personality or cultural differences, and it wasn’t always clear who was right, but it was valuable learning when to trust my own instincts and seek other sources of wisdom.

When it came to functioning in the American workplace, the generational gap was the overriding factor and it became most obvious that there were ropes I’d have to learn on my own.

This isn’t a revelation, every new generation has to learn to manage adulthood without training wheels on, but even after years of standing on my own, some lessons still take time to learn. These were my two biggest though:

Don’t stand up for yourself

Then: Dad was always the pacifist in the family, the salve after Mom’s fire, and I had trouble relating to him. I was always frustrated by his lack of action or motivation to act when someone wronged him. When an employee embezzled and basically put them out of business, he felt that it was better to turn the other cheek or “take the high road”. So instead of possibly recouping some of that lost money and staying afloat, my parents had to declare bankruptcy and shut down what had been their livelihood for years. That embezzler screwed us and our long time employees over and I was outraged that Dad refused to fight.

Now: I realize I didn’t know enough about their recordkeeping to know if they could have made a case but it still bothers me that he didn’t fight.

Then: When my sibling was bullied at school, I’m pretty sure the advice was the same: take the high road. By the time it was my turn to get bullied .. Well let’s just say I never waited to get advice on the matter. Even as an 8 year old, I knew I wasn’t going to stand for being literally shoved around and hurt, especially since there were never any official consequences and he never got caught. When our class bully tried to throw me off a platform, he got the biggest punch in the gut I could muster. Years of fighting with my sibling had given me a pretty good right hook and I’m sure the kid, who had at least 30 lbs on me, didn’t have an inkling that was coming. He never laid a hand on me again. My reaction to unwelcome touching, with guys twice my size who would try and force themselves on me when it was clear I didn’t want someone hovering over and hugging me, remained the same throughout the years. No one ever had the temerity to repeat their aggressions after getting a sharp elbow in return but I could NOT understand why they thought it was OK to put their arms around me, uninvited and without permission. (Actually it was clear why they did it, it was a stunt to show off to their friends what they could get away with. Joke was on them, really.) Obviously, I’m not a natural hugger.

Now:  Dad recently related an anecdote where he sharply told off his sister for advising my cousins to take the high road on some bullying situation, pointing out that if her grandchild was being pushed around and hurt, would she honestly advise turning the other cheek and keeping quiet?

Either he’s changed his stance or he only wouldn’t go to bat for his own. I don’t know what it was but he’s certainly never advocated standing up for yourself to me, he’s always tried to talk me out of it.

Trust your bosses: they mean well

Right.

Then: When my manipulative boss tried to give me cash for personal use, my parents guessed he was just trying to be nice. But my gut said there was something not kosher in being handed cash out of pocket by a married male boss with tendencies to hold unvoiced expectations over your head. He made it very clear he considered this money a personal gift, but it wasn’t so clear what he expected in return. He certainly wasn’t saying he wasn’t expecting anything nor that it was OK to decline, so from his position of authority over me, it was an incredibly awkward place to be in.

Now: I don’t know if trusting someone in a position of authority is a cultural thing or if it’s the habit of deferring to authority because they can make trouble for you (mine certainly did) but I don’t think I ever asked for their advice when it came to workplace dynamics ever again.

Are you a product of both a culture or generation gap? One or the other?

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